While this may sound rather corny, it’s a nice way to remember the concepts covered in this article and podcast which is a brief lesson in how to understand and apply the concepts of letterspacing and kerning when it comes to well designed typography.

The first concept to be addressed is Letter Spacing which is quite literally the space between individual letters in a word. You can see letterspacing as the space BETWEEN letters creating a balanced spacing that unifies the word.

In giving attention to letter spacing, you can avoid awkward spaces that upset a word’s visual balance.

One way of measuring letter spacing is measuring the space between the outside edges of the letterforms. With the advent of computer software used for design, we can be more precise in our adjustment of this spacing.

The Character menu in Adobe Illustrator makes it easy to see the setting for letterspacing. Here we see the letterspacing set to ZERO. You’ll see clear channels between each of the letters in the word.

Keep in mind, Zero is the default setting for letterspacing. But that doesn’t mean you should leave it that way, especially if you’re planning on being a professional designer.

But maybe you’re having difficulty seeing the positive and negative spaces. That is, the letter shapes and the spaces around them. Try flipping the word upside down.

This way you begin to see the letters as shapes, rather than parts of an alphabet.

With the word shown upside down, the major gaps between the letters start to become more obvious.

Now when we look a it right side up again, if we change the setting for Letterspacing to “Auto” in Illustrator we’ll begin to see a difference in the letter spacing.

Notice the word seems to take up a little less space. Here you can also see the menu in Illustrator showing the letterspacing set to “AUTO.”

Just as a side note, if you use InDesign, the default setting for linespacing is called “Metrics”.

Just like it sounds, Metrics takes a mathematical approach to letterspacing. But it doesn’t take into account how some letters have different negative shapes around them than others.

To create a more “VISUALLY” balanced letterspacing, you can choose yet a third approach to letter spacing.

Change the letter spacing to “OPTICAL”, and the software takes a more aesthetic approach to balancing the spacing between the letters.

Here you can see the letter space setting is “OPTICAL” in the character menu. But note that this third version of the word “LOVE” looks far more balanced in its spacing, than the first two.

So now that you know about Letter Spacing, how is it different from Kerning?Letterspacing applied to the space between individual letters but throughout the whole word. But Kerning applies to the manually adjusted space between specific letter pairs.

Or, more accurately, kerning is the adjusted spacing between very specific letter pairs, especially characters such as OV or AW. Kerning happens when we readjust the negative space around the letters in order to create a visually unified result. While kerning an entire paragraph would be an incredibly tedious task, manual kerning IS important when designing headlines and logotypes.

In the example shown here, the second version of Love has been manually kerned in order to address the balance of negative spaces and positive shapes.

The menus shown here show the changing space between the different letter pairs each manually adjusted to address the visual balance of the SPACE between the different shaped letters.

This all sounds great! But how DO you manually kern letter pairs? You do it by selecting the letter BEFORE the space you are going to adjust.

The word WAVE will act as our demonstration. Take note of the awkward spaces between the letters.

Here’s the word flipped upside down.

Now you can really see the awkward spaces. See how the negative space between the W and A is larger than the other spacing.

Kerning is a rather subjective activity and requires a practiced eye to get the hang of it. But you can see from this example how Kerning can be important to good design. Watch how you can begin to kern the specific spaces between the letters to create a unified design.

This time, using Adobe InDesign to demonstrate, I’ve selected the “W” to begin to kern the word. In the menu shown here, there is a Zero in both the Letter spacing and Kerning settings.

For InDesign, I’ve set the letterspace setting to Optical, and adjusted the Kerning setting (on the right) to -30 for the space between the W and the A. As I go through these steps, watch how the word begins to shrink in width, due to the reduced spacing.

To balance the spacing of letter pairs in the rest of the word, I continue my kerning by selecting the “A” and changing the kerning setting to -17.

To make the final adjustment of the spacing between the V and the E, I’ve selected the “V” shown here and then adjusted the kerning setting to -8.

Here again you can see the original version and the KERNED version of the word.

When you begin to see the graphical shapes and spaces of letterforms, you are beginning to see their design functions and potential. Kerning is just one tool that you’ll utilize to create more professional typographic design